Yeah, I ran out of categories…

Not really. The motivation here is that while I find myself to be quite vanilla, there are still movies about these topics that appeal to me. On the other hand, I avoided putting the top 10 in the title, because finding 10 great movies about this topic turned out to be difficult.

Some rules.

1) Queer is not in itself kinky. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a great movie, but it is not kinky. However, there seems to be a strong connection between the two in movies. The reason is probably that you need some amount of courage to do either, so if you have enough courage to do one, you probably have enough to combine them.

2) Consent is important. I like The Handmaiden very much, but to me that is not kinky. That’s just perverted, which can also make for good movies, but kink should definitely include consent. Salo is not kinky. It’s just messed up. Here’s where this gets complicated: The situation with the consent might change. I know this is fucked up. My least favorite Tom of Finland pieces are the ones where someone is raped until they learn to like it. That’s doesn’t sit well with me, nor should it sit well with anyone. Still… well, you’ll see.

3) These movies can’t condemn the acts. Sure, characters can, but the movie as a whole shouldn’t.

4) If the motives behind the movie are opaque to me, I left it out just in case. A specific example: Glen or Glenda. Yes, it’s a very bad movie, but it is also very interesting. However, I don’t know about Ed Wood’s true thoughts on the subject. Was Wood a trans woman who was never able to accept that? Was Wood just living in a time where that didn’t seem like an option? So, I felt it was better to just leave it out. (And of course, the quality is also questionable.)

In general, researching for this was pretty hard. What I usually do is that I search my movies for specific interests on IMDb. But what is the correct one to use here? “Steamy romance” gave me a few, but not that many. Part of the problem is that many of these interests haven’t been added to movies, part of the problem is that the people using IMDb don’t always seem to agree with my rules, and part of the problem is that from the point of view of this particular “interest”, a couple fucking in missionary is steamy in much the same way as the other movies on this list.

I guess the question is, am I kinky? Not very. In my experience, everyone is to an extent and my lack of kink doesn’t mean I can’t be interested in other people’s interests. Actually, that might be my biggest kink: I want to understand, even in regards to what makes people tick sexually, but at the same time, I want to be respectful about this.

Duke of Burgundy

I love Peter Strickland’s work. His ability to find new points of view on genres is so intriguing. Just subverting them in these weird ways, like rape-revenge movie where the victim realizes it was never worth it, or the giallo movie where we experience the movie only through the sounds as our sound technician works on it, while facing horrors of his own, and so on.

Duke of Burgundy is a domestic drama about a couple where the wedge is that one of them is very much into submission. The other, older party isn’t as keen on being dominating, but goes along with it to maintain the relationship. There’s one classic discussion where they order a complicated bed. The wishes of the submissive partner are wild and she gets frustrated when the artisan has a pretty long delivery time.

Also, there are no men in this world. Our couple is lesbian, the older woman holds regular lectures about insects to a crowd of women, and so forth, but in the end, that doesn’t really matter.

Pillion (2025)

Colin meets Ray… well, actually, Ray announces himself to Colin and Colin just goes along, pretty soon ending up in a relationship where Colin is the sub and Ray is the dom.

Colin’s parents, mostly mother, have objections about Ray, but only because to them Ray is a distant figure. They have no objections regarding homosexuality or their lifestyle (which they must be aware of, to an extent, because Colin wears a lock on his neck, for which Ray has the key).

I also like how two worlds collide here. Colin and his family are from a British sitcom, while Ray walked in from The Northman.

Sanctuary

I don’t know how much I should talk about this, but I’ll just say that a rich man has hired himself a dom, but the dom has a very specific approach to her work. So now the man wishes to end this professional relationship, but that leads to a night of each of them trying to get the upper hand. How much of this is actually just their games? I don’t really know.

Belle de Jour (1967)

A newly-wed couple isn’t having sex, because the wife is not into it. Instead, she goes out during the day, when her husband is at work, and becomes a sex worker to satisfy her needs. Her customers are also on the weirder side, even though Bunuel had to cut out the most extreme stuff. Not extreme in the sense of sexuality, but just religious symbols and so forth.

This stars Catherine Deneuve and was directed by Bunuel. How could such a thing go wrong? And Deneuve is still willing to be kinky, as almost 50 years later (in 2015) she played a woman finding solace in having an affair with a gorilla when her husband turned out not to care about her imminent death in The Brand New Testament.

Secretary

I guess this is the standard bearer in this space. Or maybe 50 Shades of Grey has overtaken it, but I haven’t seen that. Anyhow, this is a bit problematic as all of this happens in the workplace between a boss and his secretary…

Anyhow, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a timid woman who has a tendency to self-harm. At least she stops doing that when the affair gets going.

I mean, this is a good movie, but I just find the workplace dynamic off-putting.

La bête (1975)

This was originally supposed to be a segment in the anthology movie Immoral Tales (and it has been reincorporated in the more recent versions). Of course, it had to be extended, but for whatever reason, they didn’t get the original star, a Finnish-born Sirpa Lane, and instead she is now just a figment of the main character’s imagination, when she dreams of bestiality.

The dream is Lane first trying to get away from a monster and then fully committing to having sex with it. The story around it is just about a young woman trying to figure her own sexuality out and is not very memorable. She mostly just sneaks around a castle.

R100 (2013)

This movie goes so hard on the kink that the joke is that it should be restricted to only people aged 100 or above. Essentially its just a wild, very raunchy comedy, where a man contracts a service where he is going to have sexual encounters at random times, often specifically to cause him embarrassment.